Honda Joins Zomato, Blinkit Viral Ad – Scooter Mangoge, Activa Denge

Honda Activa is the highest selling scooter in India – And that too by a huge margin

Billboard wars are common sightings in most parts of the world. We have seen Ford and Chevy by General Motors often indulge in billboard wars. Other notable billboard wars are from Coca-Cola and Pepsi and so on. In India, outside a mall, there was a billboard war between delivery apps Zomato and Blinkit.

A dialogue from a Bollywood movie was used as a template here. You must be wondering why we are writing about delivery app billboard tussles, right? That is because HMSI (Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India) swooped right in and used this theme to market its Activa lineup for good measure.

Scooter Mangoge, Activa Denge

Zomato’s billboard read ‘kheer mangoge, kheer denge’, while Blinkit’s billboard read ‘doodh mangoge, doodh denge’. Netflix too joined, saying ‘Wednesday mangoge, Friday denge’. Honda saw a marketing opportunity here and got a billboard installed which read “Scooter mangoge, Activa denge”. This is a nod to how popular Activa has become in today’s date.

Not just today’s date, Activa has been dominating the scooter market for years now. With sales easily hovering around 1.5 lakh units and peaking at around 2.5 lakh units during festive season, Activa is notoriously known to have decimated its rivals in terms of sales. In 2022, Honda sold a whopping 20,12,515 units of Activa.

When opposed to 6,68,829 and 4,39,500 units of Jupiter and Access, Activa sales are far ahead. If top 10 scooters are concerned, Activa’s sales will be greater than the first 7 or 8 highest-selling scooter sales combined. If you take a look at the table below, it is evident that Activa sales are almost more than triple as opposed to the immediate next highest-selling scooter.

Very few scooters in the Indian market have achieved such legendary status. Some of the others include Chetak by Bajaj, a word synonymous with scooters in its glory days. Chetak is now resurrected in an EV form by Bajaj Auto.

Activa is Scooter, Scooter is Activa

The Activa name is so popular that even Honda chose to use just one of its brands to market their scooter supremacy. Other scooters in Honda’s arsenal include Dio and Grazia. There used to be Navi and Cliq in Honda India’s scooter portfolio, which have been axed for good reasons.

With an upcoming electric scooter in the pipeline, it is highly likely that Honda will try to associate with Activa brand in some way to establish familiarity in its maiden EV venture. This upcoming EV by Honda is set to see the light of day by the end of this year.